Welcome!
Be part of our community & join our international next generation forum now!
Categories
In this Discussion
- CothermanDistilling May 2016
- FullySilenced May 2016
- grim May 2016
- jacksonbrown May 2016
- Knafs May 2016
- punkin May 2016
- Smaug May 2016
- zymurgybob May 2016
Hobby-Level Bain-Marie Kettle
Any thoughts on a hobby level bain-marie kettle where you can cook, mash, ferment & distill in a single vessel? I was reading a thread on HD and this type of system would solve a number of problems for me, but I have neither the skills nor inclination to build it on my own. Any chance StillDragon has something like this in the works?
Comments
It's not a cheap rig to make, and the smaller sizes don't necessarily mean hobby prices, at least what I would think. Probably why so many on the hobby side have gone the direct steam injection route. On the single wall side, so many low cost options to repurpose - kegs or milk jugs, etc. There really aren't many options to repurpose double boilers.
It looks like wax melters use water jacketed kettles. Water Jacketed Stainless Steel Tanks @ SoapEquipment.com
Certainly not cheap, and a bit of work left to do to make it appropriate for distilling, but it's a start.
Yes the difference in price from a vessel thats 120 litres to one thats 380 litres is not great. It's the same amount of work that goes into both, just a little more materials in the larger one.
I don't think the vessel you are after has been invented yet either, i had a rather complex failed go at it with direct steam injection and some other have too. I haven't seen a real good repeatable working system drawn up anywhere.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
The cost on a per liter basis would really put the price way out beyond the single wall price.
I think I have a drawing for a 75L some where. Lemme look and see.
StillDragon North America - Your StillDragon® Distributor for North America
I think the ticket is to be able to find a low cost heating wrap for a single wall vessel - like larger silicone heating elements to jacket the full exterior with a low enough watt density.
I would imagine a tight fitting wrap and a layer of insulation on a thin single wall tank would get you pretty close.
However - I'm sure the custom silicone element would run a couple hundred bucks on top of the vessel.
It probably wouldn't be fast either, trade off is going to be slow heat up times.
This is the thread on HD that piqued my interest.
For me, I'm less concerned about the cost but more about having a reliable, professionally built vessel that solves a bunch of issues for me. I could probably have it custom built, but I don't trust my knowledge enough (especially as it comes to safety items) for me to be comfortable speccing it out to a fabricator.
could you put a 50L inside a 60L US keg or a milk can boiler?
Put a keg inside a 20 gallon stockpot, drill a hole for some elements, make a stand-off to hold the keg above the elements, fill with peanut oil, go to town?
Sure is messy though, probably as dangerous as frying a turkey too. Although when you are done you can throw in some chicken and have a little bit of a celebratory dinner for finishing a run.
I really think there is merit to the ideal of using some sort of flexible heater wrap around a lower-cost vessel. Electric is easy to control, manage, monitor, no mess, no secondary fluids, no risk of flash or coking like using HT oils, etc.
I've been dicking around with the idea of a direct (no-water) TEC/Peltier dephlegmator too. Would be a fun combination - nearly entirely electric rig - on a small scale of course.
IBC totes with a steam jacket option on all sides maybe a cost-effective option... even if you heated with hot oil
copper pot with direct flame worked for thousands of years, and steam on stainless for a hundred or so... we should be able to make a modern electrical system that works as good... succumb to the fact that we need large surface area and even heating or limited temps... and your paths are narrowed... for the surface area, you either use the outside of the pot or something inside the pot... for even heating or limited temps, we can use copper for even or steam / electronics for the even...
Me? I say stainless and steam... if the factories that make beer kegs can weld on the 'chines' (the top and bottom handles) with that accuracy for $50 wholesale per keg, they can make us a dual walled beer keg or milk can with an 8" TC top and various other TC fittings for $150 wholesale and customers would pay $3-400 for it all day long... but you have to buy a container-load and keep them from selling the same thing themselves..
Usable surface area of a keg is probably 1200 square inches or so.
At a watt density of 5w/in^2 - you are talking about 6kw - that should be perfectly usable.
5 20" x 20" 1600w elements should be able to wrap a keg with little overlap, and you can even leave the bottom unheated, or get a round heating mat and add it. Problem is, brutally expensive, but you've got 8kw . Could go smaller, with 16" x 16", 5 sheets, 6kw total. Again, you are talking $500-600 in silicone elements.
Would be on-par with steam from a watt density perspective, maybe even better, wouldn't require any kind of boiler/steam generator, pressure safety/control/etc. Would be significantly easier than steam to control.
We can't get a standard milk can for that.
StillDragon Australia & New Zealand - Your StillDragon® Distributor for Australia & New Zealand
There are some ss maple syrup barrels that possible would stack inside each other...
an example here put a 30 gallon drum in a 55 or a 55 in an 85 make a bain marie add drains and so forth put some feet on it
Stainless Steel Drums @ Skolnik Industries (USA)
seems like i found a 40 and a 44 gallon drum last i searched...
happy stillin,
FS
Unless you're going to pressurize the bath, or use a liquid with a higher boiling point, the design that injects the steam that comes off the boiling bath water directly into the wash, is the one that make the most sense and has the most appeal to me.
Zymurgy Bob, a simple potstiller
my book, Making Fine Spirits
They use orbital welders for that and they're tooled up to smash them out all day, every day in production lines.
Unfortunately, what you're after doesn't compare at all even aside from the volume differences.
I like the idea of a flooded 10m high breather. No need for oils.
It's not a pressure vessel and is still technically open to atmosphere but the pressure head from the water means the bath sits at 1 bar which give you 120°C BP.
So at the end of a run when the wash in the boiler is in the high 90's you still have plenty of deltaT to work with and your stripping speed won't plummet.
A steam jacket that injects steam back into the wash will always have the problem of accelerated wash dilution.
We mash with steam injection - at full power from our steam boiler, we are injecting close to 500 pounds of water an hour, that's a lot of water (60 gallons actually).
The second issue is once you get above 200F - the ability of the wash to fully condense all the steam begins to drop, and you get steam vapor making it's way to the surface - and up the column.
While it might be effective for stripping, you are going to pay the price of needing a considerable amount of boiler headspace, and you will probably be collecting the strip at a lower proof than expected.
Two decent stainless drums and the fab work to make a reasonably effective steam jacket or bain marie that doesn't make a tremendous mess is probably pushing near $500-600usd.
Your points are well taken, and I've always wondered about how well steam condenses in hot wash, but I was talking about a water jacket, not a steam jacket.
The idea, whether or not it works out, was to do water-to-wash heat transfer while there was still enough delta-T to pass all the input energy, and when the delta-T dropped below supporting that, steam would be formed and injected the wash. I was hoping steam in that lesser amount, supplemented by the direct conduction from the boiling water bath, would give a passable heat transfer rate.
I one calculated that a 10% wash heated by steam injection to boiling from ambient would add about 13% to the wash volume. The hybrid system should decrease that greatly.
Zymurgy Bob, a simple potstiller
my book, Making Fine Spirits
@grim but still if you used drums and had it fabricated still less than the cost of a full size professional unit... and he said for hobby use... one of those steam generators for a sauna might be enough for hobby size... or one of the make your own "keg" steam generators
has anyone just brazed or silver soldered the copper coil to the outside of the boiler walls and bottom.. tubes spaced 1cm or so apart, a spot braze every couple of cm, purge the line with N2 while doing it, press the line against the kettle and tack a braze, repeat a couple hundred times.... insulate a bit, hook the top of the line to a keggle with 2 5500w elements in it, run the other end of the line into a bucket of water a foot or so deep, and fire it up... no pressure other than the 1/2PSI of the water, and 11kw heat...
Hmmmm....... 20 (ish) gallon pots on stands @ probrewer.com
@CothermanDistilling - should work
Usually tanks use half-pipe tubing welded to the jacket - but that's out of reach I think - as splitting the tubing and then getting a solid seal would be difficult.
Though, I wonder if you could make a jig to flatten one side of 3/8ths soft tubing - so that the shape more closely resembled half a circle, and then did what you suggested above - tacking in place.
Would imagine the jig would be two wheels - one with a 3/8th concave radius, and the other side a flat roller - a pipe bender jig would already have the concave wheel. It should reform - you could probably pull it through by hand. Just really need to ensure that you don't twist.